Explore the product life cycle from development through introduction, growth, maturity, and decline; compare two development styles, and examine the steps of product development with real life examples.

Expand into international markets and create new products as growth slows in the maturity stage, including Ticketmaster's resale platform that converts revenue into growth.

Explore the four stages of the product development process—discovery, build, launch, and maintenance—and learn how ideation, requirements, and cross-team collaboration drive successful products.

Compare waterfall and agile development, outlining their pros and cons, and show how product backlog, sprint backlog, sprints, and retrospectives enable faster, flexible delivery of working software over heavy documentation.

Review the stages of the product lifecycle: development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline, and the four stages of product development: discovery, build, launch, and maintenance, plus waterfall and agile.

Learn how to differentiate good from bad product ideas through the customer development journey. Validate ideas and build product instinct to create killer product ideas that solve real problems.

Focuses on customer discovery to find first customer, test problem-solution fit with an MVP, and apply Steve Blank’s four steps—discovery, validation, creation, and company building—assessing pain by magnitude and frequency.

Learn the needs features benefits table to translate user needs into features and benefits, and validate product hypotheses with early, data-informed testing.

Apply this exercise to identify the core problem each product idea solves and delete non-solutions. Rank the remaining ideas by pain magnitude and frequency to guide validation.

Interview your users and customers to validate with qualitative interviews and open questions, plus quantitative tests, guiding design decisions and preventing the wrong product.

Craft interview questions to validate your top ideas by exploring the problem and impact; interview at least three users per idea, update the NFP table, and choose one to pursue.

Recap emphasizes solving high-magnitude pains with features, applying customer development methodology in discovery, validating ideas through open questions and interviews, creating needs features benefit tables, then narrowing to one idea.

Practice a SWOT analysis of Dropbox, which enables automatic cross-device syncing, backup, and easy sharing of photos, docs, and videos across computers, phones, and the web.

Compare the swat analysis of Dropbox, noting strengths in innovation and ease of use, weaknesses in security, and opportunities and threats from competitors to guide investment for growth.

Identify key points of differentiation among competitors and use a feature table to perform a competitive analysis across dimensions like ease of use, community focus, and driver tools.

Size the market to gauge opportunity using supply-side and demand-side methods, illustrated by MLS attendance and US television markets, emphasizing order of magnitude accuracy and investor scrutiny of thought process.

Identify how trends act like waves in the marketplace, including technology, social, regulatory, and socio economic trends, and learn to leverage them to accelerate product growth.

Explore a recap of section 4, revisiting SWOT analysis as a strategy framework, competitive landscape differentiation, market sizing with two methods, and four growth-driving trends.

Birth of the NASA app shows product discovery converts NASA's unique content into a daily mobile experience, validated by user interviews and analytics, and pitched to leadership.

Explore the vision deck concept for NASA's iPhone app, detailing mission updates, the astronomy picture of the day, and a launch countdown, with a backend that aggregates mission Twitter channels.

drive user centred design and a durable product vision by validating ideas through user feedback, managing stakeholders, and maintaining focus on the users throughout development.

Explore this teardown of app navigation, comparing tab bars and square menus, to show how fewer taps and clearer feature visibility improve daily delivery of fresh content.

This recap emphasizes driving a user-focused product vision through empathy, using personas and empathy maps to align stakeholders, as illustrated by NASA's first app case study.

Learn to model user research with personas, name, photo, description, and goal, to guide product management decisions, using a lightweight three-column template and steps to interview, observe, and group users.

Avoid celebrity photos in personas to prevent bias and believability issues. Keep personas lightweight and avoid overdefining backstory in description or demographics to allow growth as you learn more.

Explore video stories of two Getaround car owners to craft distinct personas, and complete an exercise to create a persona for your own product idea.

Create at least one persona for your product idea, possibly multiple such as a consumer and a back-end employee, and name them with an adjective initial, like impatient Irene.

Build deeper user empathy by applying an empathy map that captures see, think, feel, hear, say, and do to uncover sensory insights.

Create an empathy map for your product idea by adding as many items as you can. Infer thoughts, beliefs, and feelings from observable cues like body language, tone, and words.

Develop empathy as a core product management skill by creating personas and empathy maps from interviews, extracting patterns, and detailing four key items: name, photo, description, and goal.

Explore lean product design, where every feature is a test and the build–measure–learn loop accelerates learning through MVPs, hypotheses, and quick experiments.

Design lean product experiments by forming a hypothesis, selecting actionable metrics, and running focused tests to learn, with team alignment guiding whether to modify the experiment.

Explore smoke selling with a one-page landing page to test product interest and grow sign-up conversions via targeted ads and email capture.

Create a product demonstration video to show how your software works even without a working product. Demonstrate cross-device syncing, public links, and shared folders to highlight seamless access and collaboration.

Use the concierge method to manually simulate a service and validate demand before product development. Learn from Zappos' MVP approach of listing shoes online and fulfilling orders by hand.

Balance past data with product instinct to launch innovative features through a data-informed approach. Evaluate results after launch and sunset unproven ideas to disrupt industries rather than chase past metrics.

Design and run a minimal viable product test to validate your top product idea by formulating a hypothesis, metrics, and an experiment that yields a quantitative signal.

Create a rapid feedback loop through lead product design, quickly building, measuring, and learning with MVPs, a hypothesis, metrics, and experiments, including smoke tests and concierge tests.

Learn to turn ideas into focused products using a product definition statement and persona testing, narrowing to three core features, with a college shopping app example.

Learn to create a feature backlog in agile, detailing user stories, bugs, and epics, with INVEST criteria and a visible, single-source, dynamic backlog, including MVP and icebox concepts.

Master how Pivotal Tracker organizes a feature backlog into stories, estimates effort with story points, and tracks velocity across iterations to guide delivery and acceptance.

Create a feature backlog for your product by drafting a product definition statement, building 10–20 backlog items, and moving uncertain features to the icebox, with pivotal tracker for public project.

Craft a product definition statement for a defined persona, then build a feature backlog of user stories and bugs, and manage ideas in an ice box with pivotal tracker.

Explore wireframes as the skeleton of your product, from lo-fi sketches to hi-fi prototypes, to test ideas with users and stakeholders and gather developers' feedback.

Explore wireframing with Axure by building a one-button prototype, linking pages, previewing in the browser, and publishing generated HTML and JavaScript files to a cloud hosting service.

Learn to save time wireframing by using masters in asher, reusable components that populate pages from a single update, such as a navigation bar across all screens.

Wireframe a simple prototype in Axure RP by adding widgets to create a navigation header. Convert the header into a master, lock its position, and link buttons across pages.

Learn to use high fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes to gather early feedback, iterate with developers and designers, and run cost-effective user testing across all app screens.

Learn to conduct user testing by asking three questions, observe hesitations to spot confusing user interface, clarify button labels, and ensure the app feels intuitive and behaves as users expect.

Create wireframes for three linked pages, including login, a list of items, and an item detail, starting with sketches, then build an interactive prototype for a friend to test.

Differentiate low fidelity and high fidelity wireframes, from pen-and-paper sketches to software prototypes, using the actor tool to create functional prototypes and guide user testing with key questions.

Learn to write user stories by breaking features into components, creating checklists, and detailing acceptance criteria to guide developers and prioritize value on the product roadmap.

Explore the qualities of user stories, mastering concise titles, short descriptions, and invest principles: independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, sized right, and testable, to drive effective backlog discussions and acceptance criteria.

Prioritize stories by testing assumptions to front-load risk and maximize impact with limited resources. Use three methods—the assumption testing, the Moscow method, and the buck method—to rank backlog by value.

Apply the MoSCoW prioritization method to align stakeholders on story importance. Classify requirements as must, should, could, and won't, and use practical tips for defining priorities and release planning.

Learn how to prioritize stories with the buck method (BUC), which weighs business benefits, user benefits, and cost to produce a buck value and rank the backlog by highest value.

Learn how to size and estimate stories by breaking features into simple pieces and defining the definition of done. Use story points and velocity to estimate duration and plan releases.